Someone Took Remote Control of My iPhone Through FaceTime. What Do I Do Now?
TL;DR
- If a caller had FaceTime remote control of your iPhone, they could open apps, tap your screen, and send messages, but Apple blocks them from touching Face ID, Apple Pay settings, or erasing the device.
- Tech support scams cost Americans $2.13 billion in 2025, and people 60 and older accounted for nearly half of that, according to FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center data.
- End the FaceTime call first. That single action kills both screen sharing and remote control at once, before you do anything else.
- Call your bank’s fraud line immediately if the caller opened a banking app during the session, even if you’re not sure what they did.
- Today, check Settings, then General, then VPN & Device Management for a configuration profile you don’t remember installing, and delete it.
You were on a FaceTime call with someone who said they were from Apple, your bank, or “computer support.” They asked you to share your screen so they could see what was wrong. Then they asked for something called remote control, and you tapped Allow because they sounded like they knew what they were doing.
Now the call is over, or maybe it’s still going, and you’re not sure what they touched. That’s the right thing to be worried about. Here’s what to do, starting with the step that matters most.
First: end the call, right now
If the call is still connected, hang up. Not “wrap up the conversation.” Hang up.
Ending a FaceTime call kills screen sharing and remote control at the same instant, according to Apple’s own guidance on managing these features. There’s no lingering connection after the call drops. If you can’t find the red end-call button because your screen is being controlled by someone else, press and hold the side button until you get the power-off slider, or hold the side button and volume button together, and force the phone to shut down. That ends the call too.
Do this before you read the rest of this article. Everything else assumes the session is already over.
What remote control actually let them do
Worth understanding exactly what happened, because the honest answer is “less than you’re afraid of, and still enough to matter.”
FaceTime on iPhone has had screen sharing since iOS 18, and a separate, second permission called remote control that a caller has to request on top of screen sharing. Apple’s personal safety guide lays out what each one grants.
Screen sharing alone just shows the other person what’s on your display. They can see your apps, watch you tap around, and point things out, but they can’t touch anything. A “Viewing My Screen” indicator sits at the top of your screen the whole time.
Remote control is the bigger ask, and it’s a separate prompt you have to approve. Once it’s on, the other person can open and close apps, change settings, delete files, and send messages, functionally the same as if their finger were on your screen instead of yours. A “Remote Control Active” banner runs across the bottom of the display for the entire session.
Here’s the part that actually matters for damage control: Apple built in real limits. According to the same guide, a remote caller cannot change your Apple Account settings, cannot touch Apple Pay, and cannot erase your device. Face ID also switches off automatically the moment remote control starts, for the whole session. They didn’t get your whole digital life. They got whatever was open, or whatever they could open, in the apps already on your phone.
That’s exactly why banking apps are the real target. A local police department in Florida put it plainly in a public alert about this scam: “the attacker can launch your banking app and wire transfer your funds to any account they own.” If your banking app was logged in and unlocked during the session, that’s the scenario to treat as urgent. If it wasn’t open, or you’d logged out, the exposure is smaller.
How this usually starts, and it’s rarely a random call
Almost nobody gets cold-called out of nowhere and immediately agrees to a screen share. There’s a setup first, and it’s almost always a message that puts you on edge before the phone even rings.
A text claiming your bank account was frozen. One claiming your Apple ID is locked. A pop-up while you’re browsing that says your iPhone is infected and lists a phone number to call. All three are designed to get you calling a number, or answering one, while you’re already anxious enough to skip your normal skepticism. We’ve covered the bank fraud alert version and the Apple ID locked version in detail if either sounds familiar. Once you’re on the phone, the pitch shifts to “let me show you on a video call,” and FaceTime is right there, already installed, already trusted, with your name on it.
That trust is the whole reason this version of the scam works. Nobody would let a stranger install AnyDesk on their laptop without a second thought. But FaceTime is Apple’s own app. It feels safe because it usually is, right up until someone talks you into handing over the wheel.
What to do next, in order
Call your bank or card issuer if a banking app was open. Use the number on the back of your card or your bank’s app, not a number the caller gave you. Tell them a remote session accessed the account and ask them to flag and review any transfers made during the call. Consumer protection under Regulation E and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act generally still covers a transfer a scammer tricked you into or executed through deception, based on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidance, even though you were on the call when it happened. Banks don’t always get this right on the first call, so if you’re told a transfer you didn’t personally authorize can’t be reversed because you were “on the call,” ask to escalate and file a formal dispute in writing. This is general information, not legal advice specific to your situation, and a consumer protection attorney can help if your bank pushes back.
Check for a configuration profile you didn’t install. Go to Settings, then General, then VPN & Device Management. Apple’s guide explains that a profile can be used to manage device settings and, in some cases, monitor activity. If anything is listed there that you didn’t set up yourself, tap it, delete it, and restart your phone afterward to make sure it’s fully gone. Most people have never opened this screen and it’s empty, which is exactly why it’s worth the ten seconds to check.
Look at your Apple Account device list. Open Settings, tap your name at the top, and scroll down to see every device signed into your Apple Account. Apple’s support page walks through removing anything you don’t recognize: tap the device, then Remove from Account. A device removed this way loses access to iCloud, Find My, and your other Apple services immediately.
Change your passwords, but not from the phone that was controlled. Use a laptop, a different phone, whatever’s clean. Start with email, since email is usually the recovery path into everything else, then banking, then anything else with saved payment information. Turn on two-factor authentication anywhere it’s off.
Scroll back through Messages and Mail. Remote control lets someone send messages, and scammers sometimes use that access to message contacts in your name, asking for money or forwarding something malicious, or to set up a mail forwarding rule that quietly copies your future emails to an address you’ll never see. Check your Mail app’s forwarding and rules settings for anything you didn’t set up.
Report it. File at ReportFraud.ftc.gov regardless of whether you lost money. If money moved, also file at IC3.gov, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Acting fast matters here: the IC3’s Recovery Asset Team works through a process banks call the Financial Fraud Kill Chain, and it has the best odds of freezing a wire transfer when a bank and the FBI are notified within the first 72 hours.
The scale of this problem, in numbers
Tech support scams aren’t a fringe problem. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report logged 47,794 complaints and $2.13 billion in losses for the category, making it the third-costliest crime type the FBI tracked that year, behind only investment fraud and business email compromise.
People 60 and older filed 21,333 of those complaints and accounted for roughly $1.04 billion of the losses, just under half the total dollar amount from a group that’s a much smaller slice of the overall complaint count. If this happened to a parent or grandparent instead of you, that’s worth knowing: they’re not an easy mark who should have known better. They’re the demographic these scripts are built and tested against.
Watch for the second call
A few days or weeks from now, you may get a call from someone offering to help recover what you lost, sometimes claiming to be a lawyer, a government investigator, or a “fraud recovery specialist.” This is close to always a second scam, run by people working from lists of confirmed victims. We wrote a full breakdown of what recovery scams look like and what to actually do after losing money. The short version: nobody who can legitimately get your money back will ask you to pay an upfront fee or move funds to a “secure” account to protect them.
Close the door they came through
The FaceTime call was the last step, not the first one. The first step was almost always a text or a pop-up designed to get you calling a number while you were already worried. That’s the part worth fixing so there isn’t a round two.
Turn on Silence Unknown Callers under Settings, then Apps, then Phone, so calls from numbers you don’t know go to voicemail instead of catching you off guard. For texts, iOS’s Filter Unknown Senders sorts messages from strangers into a separate tab, though it has real limits we’ve written about here. The messages that kick off this exact scam tend to reuse the same handful of phrases: “your account is locked,” “fraud alert,” “urgent action required,” across thousands of different numbers.
That’s the gap Not Today is built to close. It filters incoming texts by what they say instead of only who sent them, checks numbers against a community database of reports from people who got the same message first, and flags new phrasing with optional AI detection. Stopping the text stops the whole chain before there’s ever a call to answer, let alone a screen to share.
Not Today is a free spam-blocking app for iPhone. We built it to catch spam before it reaches you, using keyword rules, a community database of reported numbers, and optional AI detection. No account required. Download on the App Store.